


Under Stars and Sun

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: They Who Sleep in Elysium [7]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Don’t copy to another site, GFY, Gen, Language Barrier, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 05:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20237695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: Rebecca finds herself on Earth at some unknown point in the past. Just in time to dig up a new Immortal buried in the bridal clothing he never wanted to wear.





	Under Stars and Sun

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt I pulled from my table was:
> 
> 1\. Party, Do-Over, Tree, Key, Choices  
2\. Gen, Transgender, Time Travel  
3\. Highlander  
4\. Rebecca Horne, Kronos

The celebrations of a new year are constant. Seasonal shifts and religious festivals and tidal fluctuations. Planets and stations and ships. Local time, or the galactic calendar as calculated by the thrumming heartbeat of the black hole dragging the galaxy in its whirling dance.

There are places where rumors whisper things are strange with their new year. Where someone might slip into a mirrored universe where nothing's right, or skip backward or forward in time.

Rebecca knows not to discount such things, and she's careful not to be close to known ones at the right (wrong) time. She'd not be here if this one had been known. Though where and when she is now, she has no way to tell, not yet. There are many planets in the galaxy which have wide grasslands of one sort or another - or have had them in their past.

It only takes until the night falls, and the stars wheel overhead for her to realize where she is. When is harder, perhaps, but she knows those stars. Knows their patterns and their paths even when she's been centuries away from them. When she's been decades before that since she had been able to see them at all for the light of the world.

She can see them all, spinning in their dances above her head, and Rebecca is torn between laughter and tears. These are the stars of her youth, and they are the only light of the night - no distant glow of electric cities, no prickles of red-orange stars close to the ground to speak of fires.

A chance to do everything again, maybe. Joy and pain, laughter and tears, life and death. She doesn't know what to do with such a chance, though she has no way to turn it down.

* * *

He has nothing to his name but a single horse and what he could carry upon her back. Not even a family, for he had refused to do as bidden, and become some man's wife. The idea of it makes his stomach knot and heave, and worse if he contemplates that they would want him to be a mother.

So he had taken the bow his father would refuse him, the horse that had been gifted him, and the clothes his brother will be missing by now, a few provisions, and fled in the night. Snuck past the guards on careful, quiet feet, his hand on the mare's nose to keep her from calling.

With the sun risen, he had swung up onto her back, and put as many miles between himself and the camp as he could. Ridden until he had found one of the hidden places where water seeped up into a pool safe to drink. Given the mare water, and drank some himself, and let her graze while he ate under the gnarled trees.

A mile away from the water, they catch up with him. He refuses to return, and when he makes that clear with an arrow cleanly planted into his cousin's chest, they stop trying to herd him. It takes two more arrows, and another body toppling to the ground to goad one into doing more than track him.

At least he will not be made to be a wife.

* * *

Rebecca finds a cairn on a high hill which sings of Immortal life a few weeks later, the world around her greening with the advancing spring. She circles the hilltop to look over the plain for those who had left the burial before she begins to pull stones free of the cairn. Slowly working her way to the Immortal trapped within. Young and new-come to their Immortality, she would think from the feel of their Quickening.

The sun has set before she is done, and she settles in beside it to sleep some hours until the middle watches of the night, already easily returning to the rhythm of sleep that had been familiar to her younger self. Watching the stars and the moon that is waning back toward the new she had arrived with, before sleeping again until the dawn rouses her.

When she uncovers the Immortal, she carefully unwraps the shroud from the face so they will not be breathing in the fabric when they wake. Someone valued, to be dressed so richly, though Rebecca isn't certain the clothes they're dressed in were meant for a burial.

She doesn't understand the words the young Immortal speaks after they draw in a sharp and deep breath, though the tone of them is unmistakably vicious and angry. When they turns to Rebecca, and speaks - demands? - all Rebecca can do is shake her head.

"I cannot understand the language you speak. It isn't one I learned in all my centuries."

Would that Methos had been with her when this had happened, and he might know it. His fondness for language had been useful when they traveled as Magisters.

* * *

When he wakes, he can feel the weight of stone and earth above him, and soon suffocates under it. Again and again for time unknown until someone digs him free. Free, but that is all the strange person has done before sitting back beside his cairn. Pale as winter grass, with hair the color of fire, dressed in a style he has never seen worn by men or women.

He snarls when he relizes he has been buried in the wedding clothes he had never wished to wear, as if he were to be mourned as a bride.

"Could they not even leave me to rot as myself?" He wants to tear the hated garments off, but there is nothing else for him to wear. Unless. "You!" He turns to the stranger. "I would trade you clothes."

Something that does not proclaim him to be the woman he has never been, even if it is something strange.

When the person speaks - a woman, perhaps, from the voice - he can't understand any of the gabble that comes out of their mouth. It is frustrating, and he reaches out to tug on their clothing, pointing to himself, then tugging on his own, and pointing at them.

It takes some more pointed effort and gesturing, and finally stripping down to the thinnest silks next to his skin to get the point across. The strangers clothes are a little tight on him, but they do not make his skin crawl as the clothes he was buried in do.

The stranger suits his clothes better, even with the strange thing they belts about their waist, and smiles when he relaxes in the new clothes. He no longer has the bow or horse, but a horse can be stolen, and a bow the same - or made, if he gets access to what he needs to do so.

Or, perhaps, traded for, if he trades the stranger. But he finds himself unwilling to do so. For all that they do not speak a civilized language, they freed him from death, and that is a kindness he should not repay with callousness.

He walks the circle around the hill, looking out over familiar grasses, to figure out where he is, and which way his once-family would have gone. To the east from here, and north, toward the summer pastures. Which makes his path south toward the mountains that are said to touch the sky, and west along them until he finds the sea.

Looking over at the stranger, he holds out his hand. "Come with me."

If they meet others, and they wonder, perhaps he can say that she is his bride, foreign-born and speaking nothing of the tongues of the plains. Not a slave to barter, but an equal.

He smiles to himself, and closes his fingers around the stranger's when they take his hand. Yes. A new beginning, with this stranger who has woken him from death, who will only know him as himself.

**Author's Note:**

> The choice to use gender-neutral pronouns for Kronos from Rebecca's POV and for Rebecca from Kronos's POV was deliberate, as was the lack of actually using Kronos's name. And while this is the end of this story, I know there's more to tell in this AU of an AU. Including Kronos finding his name.


End file.
